Sitting at the back of a classroom in a Somerset primary school, I am watching a lesson no child should have to take.

It’s a sunny Wednesday afternoon in the down at heel market town of Bridgwater in Somerset. Outside, small scooters are lined up by the playground. Inside, the walls are crowded with children’s drawings – rainbows, animals, stick people – and their careful attempts at handwriting.

Small hands shoot up eagerly, fingers splodged with blue pen. They look impossibly young: grazed knees, untucked shirts and gap-tooth smiles; these Year Five children are still learning how to read and spell.

But at the front of the room, a teacher unzips a bag and begins placing its contents on the table. A mobile phone. A vape. Rolled up bank notes. A fake knife. And an empty Kinder Egg.

These objects are props in a lesson to teach children aged nine and ten how to protect themselves from exploitation by gangs dealing in hard drugs. That Kinder Egg, for example, can be used to hide class A drugs such as crack cocaine.

The children aren’t yet aware that their town has become a significant target for a sprawling £500 million criminal network.

‘We’ve seen it in Year Six [ages ten-11],’ the headteacher tells me later. ‘But we’ve also seen much younger children – Key Stage One [ages five-to-seven] – being drawn into it without understanding what they’re doing.’

Outside, the daffodils are in bloom. The group of children are now being shown how a message on their mobile phone – an offer of money, a request to carry something – can be the beginning of something far more dangerous.

Having been alerted to possible signs of exploitation among its younger pupils, the school has called on Escapeline, a charity dedicated to preventing the sexual and criminal grooming of young people by gangs across the South West, to run this prevention session.

This is the new front line in what is known as ‘county lines’ – the name given to the gang networks that move drugs from cities out into towns and coastal areas, often using young people to carry them.

County lines can feel distant to some. But the drugs moved by exploited children often end up serving the middle-class cocaine market many prefer not to think about – the affluent suburbs, university towns and campus nightlife, where demand is hot.

There are now more than 6,500 active lines across England, Scotland and Wales, with at least 27,000 teenagers and children – 4,000 in London alone – trapped within.

For the latest episode of the Mail’s investigative video series, Underground UK, I have travelled across the country researching what those on the ground are calling ‘County Lines 2.0’.

I found a model of criminality changing faster than police, parents or policymakers can keep up with as recruitment moves online – through Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, gaming platforms and private group chats – allowing gangs to reach children younger, faster and out of sight of adults.

‘Group chats are a big part of it. I could be added by someone from the other side of London, he can offer me something and I’d take that straight away.’

I’m sitting outside a community centre in Dagenham, East London, with 17-year-old Dyllan who was drawn into county lines at just 14.

He is dressed head-to-toe in a matching tracksuit, spotless trainers and a huge puffer jacket. The hood is pulled up around his face but a toothy, mischievous smile occasionally breaks through when I ask him a question he knows he shouldn’t answer.

‘I know kids on my block who are ten years old and shotting [running drugs for others]’ he says, glancing occasionally over his shoulder as he speaks.

He told me most of his friends do it. ‘It happens all the time. They’ll just ask you where you’re from and ask if you want to make a piece of bread [money]. Tell you what you need to do, and then it goes from there.’

Finding new recruits can be deceptively simple. On platforms such as Snapchat, it begins by being added to group chats, or via direct messages from strangers.

Charity workers told me that having large numbers of ‘friends’ online is a sign of popularity for younger children, so they may accept people they recognise vaguely, or have mutual connections with, but do not know.

Features such as ‘Snap Maps’ can reveal a young person’s exact location, too. Coupled with these large ‘friend networks’, it’s easy for gang members to make contact – sometimes by targeting specific individuals, or by casting messages widely and waiting for those most vulnerable to respond.

‘They can just text someone and say, I can give you seven bags if you go OT,’ he says. ‘Most guys will do that.’

By OT, Dyllan means going ‘Out of Town’ to transport drugs.

At 14, he says the money was impossible to resist. ‘Seven bags is £7,000,’ he explains. ‘So, that was the best I could get.’ He made between £300 and £500 a week.

But the cash was only part of it. What mattered just as much was what it seemed to promise – status, belonging, the sense other boys his age were already ‘making it’ and he needed to keep up.

Sitting attentively beside Dyllan is Derek, the founder of Be Heard As One, an East London organisation supporting young people at risk of exploitation – the man Dyllan now describes simply as ‘Dad’.

When Derek first met him, Dyllan was barely attending school and regularly being arrested. Derek recognised the pattern immediately. He had been drawn into the drugs trade as a teenager after growing up in care and leaving school at 13.

He would go on to recruit children such as Dyllan into county lines himself, before being sentenced to ten years in prison. It was there, working in the prison library, that he learned to read and write.

‘I used to Tipp-ex my shoes to put an extra white stripe on them, to look like Adidas,’ he tells me of his childhood. ‘So they’d look like the real thing. I went into school and everyone started laughing. That was the day that I decided I’m going to make my own money. That was the day that I went on the road.’

What Derek, Dyllan and others described to me in the course of my investigation was not really about drugs. It was about wanting to fit in – and not being the one everyone laughed at. That pressure is relentless.

‘Social media has changed everything,’ says Junior Smart OBE, who is a youth worker at St Giles’ Trust, a charity that works to help break cycles of crime and exploitation.

As a youth, he was drawn into crime by a group he once thought of as friends – the people who’d been with him in the hospital room when his mother died. He was later sentenced to 12 years in prison for serious drug offences.

‘Young people are spending most of their time online and what they’re seeing is constant – money, success, lifestyle.’

We are standing in a car park in Milton Keynes as he pulls out his phone. Within seconds, he scrolls through a stream of TikTok videos: young men posing with thick wads of cash, designer trainers and layers of luxury watches.

One image shows a newborn baby covered in £50 notes. Another flashes a watch captioned ‘140 bags on the wrist’ – slang for a watch worth £140,000. The account has tens of thousands of followers.

‘[These people are] appearing on podcasts, doing interviews,’ he says. ‘It’s being presented as an influencer-type lifestyle.’

For a generation growing up online, it lands.

Gen Z – and those even younger – are navigating a world shaped by economic instability and technological advance. It’s a place where traditional routes to adulthood and success – education, apprenticeships, even just a standard job – can feel impossible to achieve.

Into that space has emerged ‘hustle’ culture: quick money, side incomes and the promise of fast and easy success.

Shockingly, what’s being sold to naive young people is not always even real. Junior shows me a video claiming to show an ‘ATM malfunction’ in Peckham.

In it, men in balaclavas appear to celebrate ‘free money’ spilling from a machine. Junior says AI is making such fantasies even easier. ‘With a few clicks, you can make money appear, guns appear – whatever you want,’ he says.

Social media does not just amplify that lifestyle, It targets it. ‘As a kid, you don’t have to go looking for it,’ Junior says. ‘The algorithm will bring it to you.’

Posts showing vapes, cars, clothes, or simply a desire to make cash, can act as algorithmic signals that feed and reinforce a fascination with these subjects. I saw this myself. I set up a fake account on a burner phone to test how quickly this kind of content would surface. 

After liking and following a handful of ‘get rich quick’ accounts, my feed was filled with videos of drugs, wads of cash and offers of money from older men.

It is a pattern Junior recognises from his work. He tells me about one boy who began by searching for ways to make money online, buying and selling items on eBay.

As he searched for and engaged with more ‘side hustle’ content, the algorithms began pushing similar material towards him.

That led to contact – messages offering faster ways to make money. Before long, he was selling MDMA and crack cocaine.

Detective Superintendent Dan Mitchell, head of the National County Lines Coordination Centre, says social media has ‘undoubtedly exacerbated’ the grooming of children, making it easier for ‘ruthless gangs’ to exploit them.

Policing is adapting as the gangs’ methods evolve but he says platforms also have ‘a responsibility to help protect their young users’.

Later, Dyllan takes me back to the block where he did his first ‘shot’. He pulls out a vape, then shoves it into his pocket, grinning – as if I might tell his mum.

From the outside, the block of flats looks unremarkable but Dyllan already seems less relaxed.

‘When I walk here,’ he says, ‘I get PTSD.’

He tells me of the first time he walked in, surrounded by ‘olders’ he didn’t know. ‘If you don’t do what they say you’re thinking “it’s going to end up bad for me’’.’

This is the reality behind the promise of quick money. Once a child or teen is in, the ‘offer’ can quickly become obligation: the money turns in to debt, the offers become instructions and shared locations mean the people controlling them always know where they are.

Dyllan tells me about a friend who was chased from a chicken shop over a debt of £10. He was stabbed five times in the back,

barely surviving the brutal attack. Was Dyllan scared of the same thing happening to him? ‘Of course,’ he says, suddenly serious. ‘I don’t want to get stabbed.’

Even now, after meeting Derek, attending college and looking towards working in construction, the fear has not left. ‘When I leave my house, I’m bare [very] paranoid,’ he says. ‘You can’t just walk down the road and not be like, something might happen to me.’

Sosa wasn’t so lucky. Aged just nine, he did not understand what he was being asked to do.

I meet him at an undisclosed location, chosen because some of the people from his past still pose a risk. We are told not to film outside, so we speak in the stairwell of his flat.

Sosa is now 27, with shiny silver grills (dental jewellery), a soft voice and the watchfulness of someone who has learned not to feel safe too quickly.

At the age most children are learning their times tables, Sosa says he was being shaped into a ‘child soldier’ for violent drug gangs – moved around the country, stabbed on more than 11 occasions, branded with an iron and taught to use a firearm by his 11th birthday. ‘I was introduced to drugs as colours,’ he tells me. ‘This is white. This is dark. If you can understand colours, you can sell drugs.’

Today, Sosa believes access to children has only become easier. As a youth mentor for Causeway, a modern slavery and crime prevention charity, he’s seen kids as young as Year Three – aged seven or eight – selling drugs without knowing it.

‘Snapchat is like a job ad,’ he says. ‘They brand it as “Easy money – just swipe up’’.’

And it’s not only messaging apps. He says young people are being reached across TikTok, the streaming platform Twitch, PlayStation – even Roblox, the online game platform and creation system. It is a chilling thought: in brightly coloured worlds built for play, cartoon avatars may be only a few clicks away from gang recruiters targeting kids.

Snapchat, Meta, TikTok and Roblox were approached for comment, but did not provide formal responses to the specific findings.

Back in the classroom in Somerset, the children sit watchfully at their desks. Earlier, when they were asked if they would carry a bag from a stranger for £20, almost every hand went up.

Now, when the question is asked again after their initiation into the dangers, no hands are raised and the room is quiet.

One can only hope the lesson stays with them. Because outside the classroom, on the phones tucked away in their pockets or bags, an offer may be just a notification away.